Archive for June, 2010

﻿For all of you who are not up to date on my latest news, I’ve got a new phone last week – a Motorola Milestone running Android 2.1 (I expected more Moto* application with the Motorola brand, but I only got a Media Dock home app and a driving home app – not even the “Motonav” navigation software, not that I mind – I use Waze).

Its a pretty cool device and (to my surprise) it allowed me to abandon all the other phones I was carrying with me, pretty much with in a couple of days (I expected it will take me at least a week to transfer all the things I was doing with mobile connected devices to a new device). So now – probably to the surprise of many of my friends – I carry just one phone instead of 3.

It again boggles the mind, how Apple takes on a well known feature of existing products, tacks a bastardized version of it on a new revision of their product, and everyone hails at how innovative they are…

Here’s the Wired quote:

iPhone 4 includes a front-facing camera and support for videoconferencing with other iPhone 4 users, via a feature called FaceTime.

Here’s what I can do today with my 3 years old Ericsson P1i, my Nokia E-whatever or my fiance’s $20 Nokia (as well as about half of Nokia phones released in the last 8 years or so), and many other phones from other manufacturers:

Above mentioned phones include a front-facing camera and support video conferencing with any other phone that supports standard 3G video calls, on any 3G network.

That’s what Apple aims to do with the introduction of FaceTime. The awkwardly named protocol could be implemented by all major handset manufacturers so that consumers could perform video calls as easily as we perform voice calls today.

There is only one problem with that statement: there is already a standard protocol for video calls – as mandated by the cellular industry’s leading standard body, 3GPP: the 3G-324M protocol, was developed jointly with ITU (the telecom industry governing body for standardization) and is implemented in virtually all video call capable cellular telecom devices.